The Solution: Cracked Flash Fiction Entry

Dragons stalked the streets, puffing out smoke and clattering their mechanical wings. Gulligan sighed. Rush hour. A dragon who had the bad sense to scuttle in front of Gulligan found himself violently kicked. The iridescent creature rolled end over end and hit the curb, sending up a cloud. Brittle things, Gulligan thought, for all their noise and pollution. Pieces of silvery scales lay like dust, drawing the trajectory of Gulligan’s kick.

Gulligan mumbled an apology and kept walking. The three-inch pest began to swear in its own language. Gulligan understood, but pretended not to. From behind he could hear metal scraping against the charred asphalt and knew the dragon was coming after him. Gulligan stopped short. Sure enough, he felt the sting of warmth and impact as the dragon rammed into his calf. The smell of his own seared flesh was immediate, but Gulligan did not flinch. Again the dragon came at his feet. This time, Gulligan lifted his leg at the last moment, sending the animal reeling.

Each sized up the other.

“Your kind never watch where you’re going,” the dragon said in the common tongue.

Gulligan snorted. “You landed right in front of my foot.”

“You shouldn’t even be on the street. The streets are ours.” The dragon pruned its ruffled scales, pulling out the chipped ones. New ones would grow back. Old ones littered the ground. The lightest metal flakes began to quiver. The dragon narrowed its eyes and backed away. He wondered that the boy hadn’t cried when he burned him. Realization began to dawn.

Too late. The dragon recognized the hum of electricity, saw the boy’s eyes vacate the avatar. Dead eyes were the last thing he saw. He and countless others were crushed to the Bombshell Boy Electromagnet, society’s solution to the dragon problem.

The end.

Random thoughts: Judging for CFF taught me more about writing than countless hours spent butt-on-chair, a little phrase I picked up from this article. It’s helpful to boil writing down to this simple, if crude phrase (I cleaned it up). Kind of reminds me of Nike’s Just Do It. Both find power in pith. Succinct advice. Not confusable. How to write? Sit down and write. Nothing’s easier than freewriting. Oh yes… what I learned from judging– understandability is more important than finesse. If I can’t understand a story, I can’t appreciate it.

I often find that when I walk away and come back later I see the forest through the trees – it doesn’t look as bad as I originally thought. I’ll also find a sentence I’ve rewritten 20 times actually looks find just the way it is.